YOUR SOURCE FOR TRUTH

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Scott Walker, God's Gift to Democrats

Matt Taibbi appearing on Democracy Now! (photo: Democracy Now!)

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

28 February 15readersupportednews.org

eltway
Democrats may not deserve good luck, but it looks like they could have
plenty in the next presidential race. Heading into the weekend, Scott
Walker, a man born to be slaughtered in a general election, is suddenly leading the Republican pack in the Iowa polls.

Walker is surging thanks to his performance at this
week's Conservative Political Action Conference, where the union-busting
governor inspired raucous applause with his "I was a dick in Wisconsin,
and I can be one in Washington, too!" stump speech.

Walker's address was a broadside against a litany of
conservative bugbears, from Planned Parenthood to the media to tax day
to the subversive act of voting without a photo ID, etc.

But the money line came during a Q&A session. Asked how he would take on radical Islamist terrorists, Walker referred to his experience taking on pro-union protesters in his home state:

If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.

Walker's seeming comparison of peaceful union
activists to head-chopping Islamic terrorists drew a predictable
response, with progressive groups like American Bridge sending out
alerts denouncing his comments, along with outrage from the Democratic National Committee.

But the National Review also called it an
"unforced error," with writer Jim Geraghty taking special offense at the
fact that Walker had forced him into a place where he had to defend, of
all people, union activists. Even Rick Perry, not exactly a kumbaya-chanting paragon of tolerance, chided Walker for crossing a line:

These are Americans... You are talking about,
in the case of ISIS, people who are beheading individuals and committing
heinous crimes, who are the face of evil. To try to make the
relationship between them and the unions is inappropriate.

In response to all of this, Walker's campaign quickly
backtracked from his statement, sort of. Campaign spokesperson Kristin
Kukowski said that Walker was "in no way comparing any American citizen
to ISIS," which sounded like a retraction.

But Walker himself denied making any offensive
comparison, and blamed the whole thing on the media. "You all will
misconstrue things as you see fit," he said.

This echoed earlier comments, made in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's "Barack Obama doesn't love America the way you do" flap, about "self-manufactured 'gotcha' moments from the media."

Meanwhile, the polls spoke for themselves. Politicians
who make major accidental gaffes usually don't see a bounce in the
numbers, but what little data there is suggests Walker surged
on the strength of this past week's performance. The Quinnipiac poll,
admittedly a small sample size and one taken extremely early in the
game, shows him at 25 percent and lapping presumptive favorite Jeb Bush, who's now limping along at 10 percent.

This came on the heels of another interesting poll. Remember how much abuse Rudy Giuliani took (even I got into the act) for accusing Barack Obama of not loving America?

Well, the Huffington Post took a poll
asking America what it thought, and it turns out that while 47 percent
think Obama does love America, the rest think he doesn't, or they're not
sure. This remarkable poll also showed that only 11 percent of
Republicans believe the President of the United States loves his
country.

All of this data speaks to Walker's remark being a smart short-term move, not a dumb gaffe.

Conventional Wisdom would hold that no candidate who's
on record comparing hardworking, law-abiding Americans to mass
torture-killers would stand a chance in a general election. But in so
holding, Conventional Wisdom would be missing the current point of the
exercise from Walker's perspective, which is to win the nomination.

And the sad fact is, you can probably win the
Republican Party nomination doing things like comparing unionized state
workers to ISIS, or hinting that the president hates America.

The entire narrative of modern conservative politics
casts the United States as a fast-disappearing Eden of freedom and
democracy that's under siege both here and abroad, surrounded by a
constellation of enemies united (for some never-fully-explained reason)
in their passionate hatred for the simple, God-fearing, freedom-loving
American.

It's not just terrorists who hate us for our freedom,
but lefty college professors, dilettante Hollywood actors, undocumented
immigrants sucking up tax dollars in the form of entitlements, Al
Sharpton, Jonathan Gruber, feminists, environmentalists who want to forcibly abort babies
to keep more room free for trees, scientists who think global warming
is real, the Manchurian President Barack Hussein Obama, etc.

The blurring of lines distinguishing these domestic
political irritants and armed foreign murder cults is rhetorically
popular and has been for a while. You can hear this pretty much every
time you turn on afternoon talk radio. Here's Rush Limbaugh's answer, when asked which is the greater threat, the liberal or the terrorist:

Both of them — both liberals and terrorists —
have a lot in common. The one thing that they hate the most is freedom… A
leftist and a terrorist — a leftist and a totalitarian — are one and
the same.

Fox's Eric Bolling not long ago blasted campus activists
for tweeting "Je Suis Charlie" when (according to him) many of those
same people were anti-speech zealots who had disinvited speakers to
their schools. "The same people want to wear these pins and tweet 'Je
suis Charlie,' I am Charlie," he said. "No you're not! You're more
Al-Qaeda than you are Charlie!"

And then of course there's Ann Coulter, who famously said this in a tirade against college activists: "Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don't hate America like liberals do."

None of this is saying anything new – people who
aren't Fox fans long ago grew used to being called traitors,
America-haters, sympathizers with Osama bin Laden and so on.

The problem is that no candidate carrying this
narrative around past the convention can win a general election. Even
Mitt Romney, a politician so sunny and loquacious that he can make it
sound like he's selling you a vacuum cleaner when he's actually calling black voters freeloaders, ended up capsizing his campaign on rhetoric like this.

Even if you're lying about it, you have to at least
pretend to have a vision for everyone. Yet the Republican Party's own
rhetoric sells half the country as a kind of domestic enemy. It's a
nearly impossible balancing act for a general-election candidate.

Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty
uninspiring. He doesn't have George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm
or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic
American dream parable like the one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a
doughy, finger-pointing white guy of the type the Republican Party has
been churning out to fill state assembly seats or run in back-bench
congressional districts seemingly since the beginning of time. He's
exactly the kind of politician the modern Democratic Party is set up to
beat.

This was supposed to be the election cycle that
featured an inclusive new conservative vision, one that reflected the
country's changing demographics and would make the Democrats work harder
for everyone's vote. Instead, they're churning out the same old
us-against-everybody narrative, filled with the same insulting bromides
about how they have a monopoly on patriotism and are apparently the only
people in America paying taxes.

If that's where this is going – if the Republican
Party runs with someone like Walker instead of having the courage to
tell their voters to stop calling the rest of us terrorists and traitors
– then they deserve to lose again and lose badly. Forget about how
offensive it is, that schtick doesn't work anymore, not even for them.

Yes, absolutely. But
to Taibi's point, what differentiates Walker from Reagan and W is that
Walker is blatantly his party's id. He is not capable of running a
"morning in America" or "compassionate Conservative" campaign, even as a
pretense. He can't even do Romney's impression of a country club
membership chairman, for all the good it did him. None of that is within
Walker's persona.The better comparison is to Nixon. Walker has a
dark disposition. He's tactical to the point of tunnel vision. He's
crooked, humorless & unreflective. The major part of his public
policy is to attack his political enemies. It's no wonder that he
conflates union members with ISIS. Enmity is part & parcel of his
politics.And yes, we did elect Nixon, but we rejected him first
(and last) and would have rejected him always, but for the implosion of
the Democratic Party. I agree (as often) with Taibi (i) that Walker is
probably the preferred choice of Republicans and (ii) that he can't win.

HELP END PET HOMELESSNESS

Just $25, and best of all, $17 from the sale of each plate will fund spay and neuter services for dogs and cats across Arizona. Click ad to order now at www.azpetplates.org ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TO ADVERTISE ON OUR BLOG

The above are paid ads. To place yours for just $25/month, call Jim Keyworth at (928) 474-8787 or e-mail peoplesgazette@gmail.com. Banner ads are also available across the bottom and top of the blog.

(The Rim Country Gazette Blog is currently averaging over 5,000 visits per month. Our readership survey shows Gazette readers are better educated and more affluent than the average newspaper reader. Gazette Blog ads reach the people most likely to vote and to use your services and products.)